Los Angeles, Calif. – The second annual Mayhem Festival is back again this year and better than ever. This year’s tour is set to kick off on July 10 at the Sleep Train Amphitheatre in Sacramento, Calif. and will rip through 27 cities in the U.S. and Canada.
Rockstar's Promotional Video. Viewer Beware: Metalheads like to curse.
Using sponsorship to deliver a lower ticket price and an enhanced concert experience, tour organizers have once again joined forces with Rockstar Energy Drink. Mayhem producer John Reese promises that fans will not be disappointed. “Given the great success of last year’s festival, we knew that we needed to put together a stellar group of talent for 2009—and we have” says Reese. Slayer, Cannibal Corpse, and Trivium will be joined by Killswitch Engage, Behemoth, and many others. “This will be a blockbuster event, one that blends thrilling live performances with special music-related events and a few yet-to-be-revealed surprises. The result is a concert experience like no other. We’re extremely excited to get the show on the road” Reese said. Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased here.
Not only will fans be surrounded by mind blowing music, but they will also be able to take part in a number of festival activities. Fans will be able to visit vendors, play the newest video games, attend autograph sessions, and experience the excitement of motocross team, Metal Mulisha.
The Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival is the brainchild of Kevin Lyman, John Reese and Darryl Eaton, the creative team behind some of the industry’s most successful road jaunts, including the long-running Vans Warped Tour .
Nobody knows how to combine technical brilliance, harmony and brutality quite like Chuck Schuldiner.
His band, Death, was formed in 1983 in Orlando, Fla. Over the next 15 years, Chuck and a revolving lineup of musicians produced seven increasingly varied albums beginning with their debut studio release "Scream Bloody Gore" in 1987.
Chuck Schuldiner is considered by many to be the father of death metal, though Chuck himself never felt so. In an interview with Metal-Rules, he stated "I don’t think I should take the credit for death metal stuff. I’m just a guy from a band, and I think Death is a metal band.”
Despite Schuldiner’s humble opinion, Death remains one of the most influential metal bands to ever grace a stage. Schuldiner's drive and ruthless creative vision guaranteed that Death would remain at the forefront of the genre's development. While the savagely raw aggression contained in Death's first three albums proved crucial to spearheading the first generation of death metal, and subsequent grindcore bands, the astounding musicianship and increasingly sophisticated songwriting found on their last efforts may have influenced even more groups exploring the limits of extreme metal's progressive outposts.
The culmination of this talent and sound came with their last album, "The Sound of Perseverance" which was released in 1998. The album opens with a barrage of drums on “Scavenger of Human Sorrow.” The guitars soon kick in with a vengeance and never let up. The extremely technical leads of Schuldiner remain one of the most intriguing aspects of Death. His mastery of the instrument combines heavy grooves with blistering solos. The Sound of Perseverance can only be described as refined brutality. The progressive sound is still there, but the overall feel is more aggressive in music, lyrics, and vocal performance. The lyrics traditionally remain very ambiguous, vague and with a lot of dark imagery. Lines like:
I would describe it as an invisible darkness Casting a shadow, a blinding black Guarded by hope, my soul is kept from The bloody claws
Are somehow not cheesy coming from Chuck.
“Flesh and the Power It Holds” is the longest track on the album and clocks in at eight and a half minutes. Despite its length, the song is filled with interesting leads and crushing drums and bass.
Though much of Death's discography may be too much for the casual listener, any fan of music can appreciate the beauty of the instrumental track “Voice of the Soul.” Schuldiner has an excellent ear for melody. This song opens with a beautiful acoustic guitar quickly accompanied by a distorted lead. This track is one of the best efforts that Death has ever produced, though it stands in stark contrast to many of their earlier efforts. From start to finish this song is full of intelligent phrasing, beautiful melodies and soul wrenching leads.
The album ends with an excellent cover of Judas Priest's classic “Painkiller.” Schuldiner combines the harshness of his vocals with an impressive high range. As always, the drums and guitars are absolutely jaw dropping.
Throughout his musical evolution Chuck Schuldiner was the constant, effective mastermind behind Death's continually groundbreaking career. Unfortunately, Schuldiner was diagnosed with a malignant brain-stem tumor and immediately underwent emergency surgery in early 2000 to remove it. In late 2001 Schuldiner contracted pneumonia and was placed back in the hospital. On December 13, 2001, Schuldiner was released and returned to his home. An hour later, the musical genius was dead at the age of 33.
Death is not a band for the faint of heart, but for fans of double bass grooves, harsh vocals, and guitar acrobatics, one would be hard pressed to find a band to rival Death.
Floyd Rose changed the future of the guitar’s sound without playing a single note. His invention of the locking tremolo system added a whole new realm of sounds and creativity to the electric guitar that had never been possible before.
Floyd Rose began playing guitar in 1963. In the beginning Rose had no real interest in the mechanical design and parts of the guitar. However, due to the competitive nature of guitarists and the revolutionary music scene of his generation, it was only a matter of time before Rose began to envision and create his own modifications.
“We played very aggressively in those days,” Rose states in an online interview with Guitar.com, “everybody trying to outdo each other, throwing guitars around and stuff. That was actually the moment I started trying to do things to the guitar. That was really the first time I started thinking about trying to modify to get what I wanted out of the instrument.”
Early versions of this device allowed the guitarist to impart a vibrato (slight, wavering pitch change) to a chord or note by moving a bar on the bridge with the picking hand. However, these devices were prone to tuning problems, and were generally unstable and quite limited in their capabilities. Leo Fender's development of the fulcrum tremolo for his Stratocaster line of guitars in the 1950's imparted greater tuning stability and range, but still suffered from a lack of tuning stability.
In the early 1970s, Floyd Rose was a guitarist who dreamed of increasing the instrument's expressive range by slamming, yanking, wobbling, and twisting the whammy bar, a metal bar attached to the tremolo, with violent abandon. This invariably left the instrument frequently out of tune. Rose determined that the way the tremolo was made was counter productive. The strings needed to be locked down to increase tuning stability. Rose felt no pressure while creating his design.
“It wasn't nerve-racking because it evolved into the product by watching other people's interests... I just wanted to modify mine and make it work. Obviously, as time went on, I'm making it and thinking about it; other people see it and go, ‘Hey, I could use one.’ All my friends played the same kind of music, and they wanted to stay in tune too. It was a gradual thing. It was never stressful to me because I was making Indian turquoise jewelry inlays and stuff at the time for my day job while I was being a musician,” said Rose.
While envisioning this device, Rose was touring with Randy Hansen, a guitarist most famous for his emulation of Jimi Hendrix. During the four months Rose was on the road, he came up with the first prototype of the locking system. He put it on a guitar and dared Hansen to put it out of tune.
“He said, ‘I'll bet you I can.’ He grabbed it and started doing the craziest things, throwing it on the floor, playing it with his foot. He picked it up, grinned, held an E-chord, strummed it, expecting it to be completely out of tune, and it was perfectly tuned. He just went, ‘Oh, my God.’ He was completely floored.”
The following diagram shows how the Floyd Rose tremolo works. In figure 1, the tremolo is at rest and in tune. The guitar’s sound and pitch are unchanged. Figure 2, shows the whammy bar of the tremolo pushed down, causing the strings to lose tension and the pitch to be lowered. Figure 3 demonstrates the pulling up of the whammy, tightening the string tension and raising the pitch of the note. The small squares on the far left represent the locking nuts placed at the end of the neck. This system will keep the instrument in tune despite the manipulation of the strings.
”Guitar Player”, still a popular magazine for guitarists, brought even more attention to Rose after they published a glowing review of his tremolo.
During this time, Floyd Rose became acquainted with Eddie Van Halen. Van Halen was frustrated with the Fender-style vibrato system's inability to stay in tune under heavy use. Van Halen used Rose’s new device in a radical way to create a vast array of exciting, never-before-heard guitar sounds. Shrieks, laughter, growls, dive-bombs, chirps, squeals and grunts began to flow from the guitar. These were alluded to a decade earlier by Jimi Hendrix, but the poor tuning stability of the Fender unit prevented him from using these extreme vibrato effects in a live context where tuning was critical.
Eddie Van Halen makes frequent use of the Floyd Rose Tremolo
Between 1978 and 1980, the Floyd Rose become the tremolo of choice for many guitarists as Rose's new system was virtually impossible to throw out of tune with rough handling. With Eddie Van Halen as its star user, it took over the world of modern guitars and fostered a whole new style of no-fear, extreme playing.
Floyd Rose’s groundbreaking locking tremolo system gave guitar players full license to maim, injure, and truly push their guitars with no risk of falling out of tune.
Rose saw a common problem and created an innovative solution. Due to Rose's innovation, players will no longer pay a price for employing aggressive whammy bar use. Rose opened up new avenues for sound and creativity; guitarists around the world remain indebted to his genius.
In 1941, Universal Pictures released The Wolf Man. In this film a man returns to his homeland of Wales to reconcile his relationship with his father. Soon after he kills a wolf that is attacking his friend. In the process he is bitten. It is no surprise that this wolf turns out to be a werewolf named Bela (Coincidentally played by Bela Lugosi)
Lon Chaney, Jr. in The Wolf Man (1941)
It was this film that introduced many of the contemporary traits of werewolves. The concepts of werewolves being vulnerable to silver was invented for the film, as well as the werewolf's uncontrollable shapeshifting under a full moon. These are considered by many as part of the original folklore of the werewolf.
April 3 will bring audience goers The Wolf Man, a film inspired by the 1941 classic. It will feature Benicio Del Toro as the young man with Anthony Hopkins playing the role of his father. Hugo Weaving is set to play an inspector who comes to the village to investigate a string of gruesome murders.
Here is some concept art done by Rick Baker of Del Toro's transformation.
Horror movies are one of cinema's oldest genres. There have been countless films over the years that frighten, shock, or downright traumatize their audiences. But how is it accomplished? What marks these films as truly scary? Terror is a universal theme with a universal definition. What I find frightening may not phase another, and vice versa.
In the current state of cinema, I believe that "scary" movies fall into two different camps, suspenseful thrillers and grotesque horror. Thrillers are typically rated PG-13 and therefore cannot contain anything too explicit. There is nothing wrong with thrillers, though some find them, at times lacking and uninspired. However, many modern horror films strive to push the envelop and shock their audiences; the same audiences that go to the film to be shocked.
Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
No one watches the Saw movies for their character development or stunning social commentary. People die in terrible ways. That's it. That is all it takes for movie after movie to be made following the same formula.
Elements of the extreme will always frighten and interest audience goers. Clearly, it is more than just blood and guts that bring in ticket sales, but a little gore goes a long way.
Today I will post a special interview between myself and Steve Meadows, creative artist and horror aficionado. Steve grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he went to high school with Tom Savini. Out of high school Steve began working on low-budget independent films and going to school for special effects and makeup.
Ron McKnight: Steve, thank you for joining us here on Strange Brew. What first got you interested in masks and monsters?
Steve Meadows: Well, growing up I watched all the classic horror films I could get my hands on. The cheesier the better, I loved it. I was obsessed with The Creature From The Black Lagoon. I wanted to be able to create monsters like that.
RM: What were some of the first projects you worked on?
SM: As kids we were always thinking up crazy stories and acting them out. Creating masks and monster make-up was always my favorite.
RM: What was the most fun you ever had working on a project?
SM: Probably working on the independent zombie film Biophage. Zombie make-up is a lot of fun because you can use so many random things you'd never imagine.
On the set of Biophage
RM: Such as?
SM: Pencil shavings, bits of sponge, Taco Bell sauce... *laughs* You name it and you can probably use it to some effect. It's all about your attention to detail.
RM: Steve, I'd like to thank you for your time and your contributions to the world of horror.
The idea of mixing comedy and horror is nothing new. The 1920s brought us The Bat and in the 1940s we were introduced to Zombies on Broadway. However, it wasn't until the 1980s that these movies succeeded at being both funny and scary.
Sam Raimi. Each film can stand on its own and each brings something unique to the table. These films are a perfect blend of horror and comedy thanks to Raimi's directing and Bruce Campbell's excellent physical comedy and delivery.
Here is a scene from Evil Dead II where Campbell's hand has been possessed by an evil spirit. Hilarity ensues.
Quick Sidenote: I also have to take a moment to recognize the comedic genius that is Shaun of the Dead. This British film is incredible. It has wit, it has gore, it has romance. It has character! But more importantly, it has zombies. Need I say more?
